THE backlash against the Italian who
dared make an Oscar-winning film that
found humour in the Holocaust has
begun. Even Steven Spielberg is said to be
privately appalled by Roberto Benigni's
romantic comedy
Life is
Beautiful.

At the Academy Awards last week there
should have been no more delightful moment
than watching Benigni clambering over the
seats in the auditorium to collect one of
the three Oscars he won for his film. But
the uncomfortable juxtaposition of his
slapstick humour and his accumulation of
awards for a comedy with the backdrop of
the murder of 6m Jews has sickened many
people.

Benigni's canonisation in Hollywood has
revived a simmering row about whether, as
the ageing generation of survivors is
dying out, the Holocaust is now becoming
trivialised, and even commercialised, in a
trend known in America as Holokitsch.

At the Florida
Holocaust Museum in St Petersburg the
gift shop offers a model of one of the
museum's exhibits, a box-car used to
ship Jews to the concentration camps,
for $39.95. For a $5,000 donation, you
can buy a railway spike from the
Treblinka concentration camp. Benigni's
film is said to be an unwitting part of
the same blight.

One of the people Benigni clambered
past on his way to the stage was
Spielberg, the director of the
Oscar-winning Holocaust film Schindler's
List. It was said that Spielberg was so
upset when he saw Benigni's film that he
wanted to walk out of the cinema and had
to be restrained by his wife, Kate
Capshaw, who told him that his exit
would be noticed.

Although it has been reported in
America and Italy that Spielberg was
appalled by Benigni's film, his only
public comment was that he felt
"uncomfortable" talking about it, adding:
"I'm happy when anyone makes a movie that
says the Holocaust happened."

Benigni insists that when they had
lunch together just before the Oscars,
Spielberg told him: "I really like - love
- your movie a lot", a comment Spielberg
has not seen fit to repeat publicly.

Whatever Spielberg may feel, others are
now breaking the ranks of those charmed by
Benigni's humour. David Denby, film
critic of The New Yorker, took the almost
unprecedented step of running a second
review of Life is Beautiful just before
the Oscars. What most troubled him was how
positively people have reacted to the film
- which has become America's
highest-grossing foreign language film,
taking $130m at the box office.

In the film Benigni plays an
assimilated Jew who is deported to a death
camp with his wife and five-year-old son.
He shields his son from the guards by
pretending their predicament is a big game
they can win if they play by the
rules.

"The enormous
worldwide success of Life is Beautiful
suggests that the audience is exhausted
by the Holocaust," said Denby. "The
film is a benign form of Holocaust
denial."

Benigni, who spent years devising the
film, claims there is a difference between
laughing at the concentration camps and
laughing in them. Others, who have
dedicated their lives to ensuring the
Holocaust is not forgotten, agree.

Shimon Samuels, European
director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre,
commented: "I think that humour is not
only an arm of the defenceless. Humour is
also an act of resistance. To have kept
any state of humour in the concentration
camps was in itself an act of resistance.
There are such cases.

"Wiesenthal is a man who treats the
realities of life in that period with a
certain very refreshing humour. It is not
a cruel black humour. He says: 'Justice
yes, but life must go on'. We in the
Wiesenthal Centre want to see humour very
much as part of the armour, combating
prejudice."

Samuels, who is not a camp survivor,
said he personally had "very mixed
feelings" about the film. "On the one hand
the story is unrealistic. We all know that
is so. As an allegory, it is a beautifully
made film. As an organisation we have
absolutely no objection in backing it and
saying it is another means of presenting a
different dimension to the Holocaust.

"Anyone who feels good after coming out
of a film that shows murder, a child
trying to make a euphemism for evil, has
not captured its true meaning. It should
be taken at face value for what it is - a
poetic rendition, trying to show through
the eyes of a child what is
unexplainable."

Mick Zwireck, 72, who spent four
years in Nazi camps including Buchenwald
[see note
below], said: "To my mind, it
is very hurtful. When people see comedy
made of tragedy, they might think it
wasn't so bad.

"I don't think people realise, you only
had to look up or smile too much and they
would have just executed you, or beat you
to death."

Additional reporting:
Jack Grimston

[One
of our Website visitors points out
March 29, 1999 that this would have
made Zwireck aged at most 14 if and
when he entered Buchenwald camp in
1941].

The
above news item is reproduced without editing other
than typographical